“I’ll argue—with only a small bit of exaggeration—
that the reference book is responsible for the spread
of empires, the scientific revolution, the French
Revolution, and the invention of the computer.”

So says Jack Lynch, professor of English at Rutgers University– Newark, in You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf from Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia, an overview of the history
and impact of reference works. The book is a bibliophile’s delight. Each chapter compares two major reference works, and
interspersed throughout are fascinating tidbits: the history of
alphabetical order, court cases involving dictionary citations, reference works that were never completed, and reference-book errors,
among many other intriguing and entertaining topics.

Lynch tells us his interest in reference stems from early exposure to books, noting that “children’s reference books grabbed
me when I was very young. And then I got my hands on my
father’s dictionary and a two-volume desk encyclopedia, and it
was love at first sight. I’d spend hours reading entries, flipping
the pages at random.

“I didn’t get a real sense of the reference world, though, untilI was an undergrad working at the University of Pennsylvania’slibrary, and my jaw dropped when I realized that serious refer-ence books filled entire rooms. I loved that there were indexes tofolklore motifs, dictionaries of the vocabulary of plant quaran-tine, and bibliographies of bibliographies. They say a first step towisdom is realizing how much you don’t know. Penn’s referencesection gave me an inkling of how much there is to know—andjust how little I did know. It confirmed my intention to go toWhen asked if he’s ever fantasized about devouring the en-tire contents of a multivolume reference work, Lynch replies,“The poet Robert Browning read the entire Oxford EnglishDictionary, and Malcolm X copied out a dictionary in prison.

I’ll never match them. But I have read a few reference booksfrom cover to cover. The longest is Samuel Johnson’s 1755

Dictionary, which I had to read through in order to edit an
abridgment in 2002. But one of the joys of reference books
is their inexhaustibility. There’s something reassuring about
knowing that we can always go back to the same book and discover something new.”

You Could Look It Up focuses on 50 major reference works, anumber Lynch arbitrarily chose “because otherwise, I’d keep writ-ing forever. Fifty seemed like a good round number, and it let mehit most of the high points—though I had to cut out a numberof genres, including chronologies, almanacs, thesauri, and priceguides. And even after I limited myself, I still had to trim the finalcopy. I suppose that’s just the nature of reference books—in tryingto cope with all the world’s knowledge, they just keep expanding.It’s only fair that a book about them also grew.”Are there any reference books on topics so obscure that theysurprised even Lynch? “There are at least two books on col-lecting silverware from the ThirdReich.” Even that disturbing fact,however, fails to convince Lynchthat the world has enough referencebooks. “Some reference volumesgrow obsolete,” he says, “and peopleget interested in new things andneed guides to what’s known. I lovethat the class of reference books isboth unimaginably vast and entirelyopen-ended—there’s no reason tothink we’ll ever stop producingreference works, even if they stopBut what about reports of thedeath of print reference? “Predicting the future of publishingis a mug’s game,” Lynch cautions, “but it would certainly befoolish to bet against the codex book, which has 1,800 years ofhistory behind it, and printing, which has been around for 550years. Then again, the digital world has a lot of attractions forreference publishing. Reference books are big, and in the printworld, big means expensive. Electronic references can be as bigas they need to be; that’s why the English version of Wikipedia,whatever its other virtues and vices, can afford to be 50 timesthe size of a print encyclopedia. It’s also rarely more than aminute or two out of date: by the time we hear a news reportthat someone important has died, the Wikipedia entry alreadyreflects the news.”The future may remain cloudy, but Lynch isn’t giving up onprint: “I certainly hope the market for printed books and pro-fessionally edited dictionaries and encyclopedias outlives me.Electronic publication offers a lot of advantages for referenceworks, and even though I read a lot on screens, I’m still a loverof well-done print books.”

Donald Altschiller, a librarian at Boston University and a longtime Booklist
reference reviewer, wrote “In Praise of Reference-Book Authors,” for the
Chronicle of Higher Education (February 12, 2012.)